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The Konica Hexanon Teleconverter AR 2x is a pretty rare piece of equipment introduced in the early 1980s for the Konica AR SLR system. The heydays of teleconverters were the early 1970s when cheap three lens [3L] converters from 3rd party manufacturers were sold widely (and inxpensively of course). Towards the mid-1970s Canon and Minolta had introduced some high performance converters specially designed for their FD 2.8/300mm Fluorite (Canon) and MD 5.6/400mm Fluorite (Minolta) lenses. Nikon would be following soon.

Around 1980 those specialized "long range" converters (300mm upwards) were supplemented by new "short range" converters for lenses in the 50mm to 200mm range. That was the moment when Konica introduced their first and only AR teleconverter, too. During this time Konica had lots of problems with unreliable electronic SLR bodies, and they were not the well respected company any more they had been in the 1965-1975 time frame. In addition around 1983 the 4/80-200mm telezooms really became popular, and thus the teleconverters (often combined with the ubiquituous 2.8/135mm lenses) became redundant. That explains the rarity of the Konica converter.

KONICA HEXANON Teleconverter AR 2x (6 Linsen / 5 Gruppen)

While the Konica AR Teleconverter 2x is a pretty sophisticated [6/5] construction - far more complicated than the earlier third party [3/3] converters - it's performance on 24 MP FF cameras is either so-so (in combination with the Hexanon 3.5/135mm and the Hexanon 4/200mm) or outright bad (in combination with the Hexanon AR 1.7/50mm). That's both surprising as well as disappointing since e. g. the corresponding Minolta MD 2x Teleconverter 300-S is much, much better when combined with the MD-III 2/50mm lens (the combination is really good), and still visibly better when combined withn the Minolta MD-II 3.5/135mm or MD-I 4/200mm lenses.